Abnormal grain growth; A Spontaneous activation of competing grain rotation

異常粒成長; 競合する結晶粒回転の自発的な活性化

Liss, K.-D.*; 徐 平光   ; 城 鮎美*; Zhang, S. Y.*; 行武 栄太郎*; 菖蒲 敬久  ; 秋田 貢一*

Liss, K.-D.*; Xu, P. G.; Shiro, Ayumi*; Zhang, S. Y.*; Yukutake, Eitaro*; Shobu, Takahisa; Akita, Koichi*

In polycrystals, grains with certain orientations grow at high temperatures at the expense of grains with other unfavorable orientations. Grain growth involves a variety of situations and mechanisms that make experimental study, modeling, and understanding extremely complex. Normal grain growth occurs in a self-similar manner, with curved grain boundaries serving as the driving force and a parabolic growth law that scales up the grain size by the square root of time. More complex growth forms include boundary pinning of precipitates and other boundaries, topological transitions that alter driving forces, grain coalescence and anomalous grain growth, but these are considered "erratic" and their initiation is an open question in modern research, without a simple experimental approach on how they should be studied. Here, we show that grain rotation upon coalescence is spontaneously activated between one grain and a favorable neighbor, through the necessary diffusive mass transport at further boundaries of the same grain leading to their activation and a competitive "erratic" reorientation in a zigzag way, while other grains in the matrix remain stable. After two grains have eventually coalesced, their surrounding boundaries are still activated leading to further rotation and growth, filling the missing puzzle stone in thermodynamic theory between normal and abnormal growth, the latter stating that abnormal growth only takes place when the size of the growing grain is already large. Prerequisites and postulates of abnormal grain growth are based on advantageous texture, grain boundary mobility, enhanced diffusion kinetics and coalescence, which can be well explained by our observations. Moreover, our observations have been enabled through a novel experimental approach using the white-beam X-ray Laue diffraction method in bulk transmission mode on a polycrystalline.